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The common dormitory was no place for him ... I am sorry to confess that, for a while, I helped to make his life miserable for him ... each night the beak-nosed pugilist-lad and I raised a merry roughhouse in the place.... Pfeiler was our chief butt. We put things in his bed ... threw objects about so they would wake him up.
Pfeiler had been left a fortune by his father, a wealthy German merchant ... so, like Sir Richard Burton, he had made off to the Near East ... where he had lived among the Turks for ten years ... till, what with his buying rare manuscripts and Oriental and Turkish art, he had suddenly run upon the rocks of bankruptcy ... and had returned from the Levantine a ruined, helpless scholar, who had never been taught to be anything else but a man of culture and leisure....
Spalton brought him back to the Eos Artwork Studios. There he found that the queer, gentle, old man was as helpless as a child ... all he could be trusted to do was to write addresses on letters ... which he was set at, not too exactingly.... I never saw so happy a man as Pfeiler was that winter. He was a Buddhist, not by pose, but by sincere conviction.
After that, Pfeiler avoided me. I went up to him in apology. Most contritely I said I was sorry.
Pfeiler, who has worked at the serum diagnosis of hydatid disease, regards the complement deviation method as the most reliable; he believes that a positive reaction may almost be regarded as absolutely diagnostic of an echinococcal lesion.
"Old Pfeiler" we called him.... Pfeiler had attended one of Spalton's lectures at Chicago. Afterward, he had come up front and asked the lecturer if he could make a place for him at Eos ... that he was out of a job ... starving ... a poor German scholar ... formerly, in better days, a man of much wealth and travel.... He had spent his last nickel for admission to Spalton's lecture.
I would tramp, as I was doing, through the country, and end up at some western university for the fall term. The art workers' community lay in my way at Eos. I dropped off a freight, one morning, in the Eos yards.... The gladdest to see me again was the Buddhist, Pfeiler.
One night I found him crying silently ... but somehow not ignobly ... this made me shift about in my actions toward him, and see how miserable my conduct had been.... So the next time "Beak-horn," as I called my plug-ugly friend, started to tease the old man, I asked him to stop ... that we had tormented Pfeiler long enough.
Maybe, if I'd keep them, they might be worth something, some day, when you're famous," he joked. "If you want to give me a couple of books ... how about this Keats and this Ossian? I want the Keats for myself. It will renew my courage. And the Ossian will you mail that book on for me, to Eos, to old Pfeiler?" I had told him, in the course of my talking, about them both.
Pfeiler used often to talk of the greatness of Ossian's poetry ... and how he'd like to possess a volume of it again ... that is, before he grew to hate me. Maybe if I sent him the book, with a letter, he would think less harshly of me. I tramped through New England. My whole life had settled back into tramping ... only my Keats remained.
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